Pieces of herself
Juliet Davis

Bio:
Juliet Davis is a new media artist/academic/writer, who comes to digital media from the field of English. Her work has appeared in the Tampa Museum of Art, Cyberart
Bilbao, FILE 2004 (Electronic Language International Festival), Dallas 500X, Rhizome ArtBase and other venues. She is a recent recipient of the “Born Digital” Award, presented by the Institute for the Future of the Book (hosted by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communication, also funded by The Macarthur Foundation and The Mellon Foundation). Davis is Assistant Professor of Communication at University of Tampa, where she teaches
theory and practice in interactive media, visual culture, and writing, with particular interest in cyberfeminism (and, more generally, intersections of gender, identity, and technology). Her most recent academic article, on the topic of aesthetic experience in virtual reality, is scheduled for publication in Intelligent Agent
Magazine (Publisher/Director: Christiane Paul), and she writes periodically for Rhizome Digest.

About the piece:
Pieces of herself is an exploration of feminine embodiment and identity in relationship to public and private space. Using a drag- and-drop game interface, viewers scroll through familiar environments (e.g., domestic, outdoor, work) to collect metaphoric "pieces" of the self and arrange them in compositions inside the body. As each piece enters the body, it triggers audio clips from interviews with women, music loops, sound effects, etc., so that layered narratives form.

The project, which was inspired by Elizabeth Grosz's theories about embodiment, comments on social inscription of the body. The environments are composites of more than 400 photographs, the pieces include 40 vector drawings, and the audio clips include segments from interviews with 10 women.

davis thumbnail

Click to enter
www.julietdavis.com/studio/piecesofherself

The Electronic Literature Lab could not preserve this Flash work with Ruffle in April 2021. We do plan to preserve it with Conifer at a later date.